Thursday, October 4, 2012

A possible Victoria by-election scenario - an all UVic battle

Donald Galloway is the candidate for the Green Party. I seems almost certain that Paul Summerville will be the candidate for the Liberals. Finally, Murray Rankin has very good odds of becoming the NDP nominee. All three of them are UVic professors.

The idea of a by-election where three of the four major party candidates are white male baby-boomer UVic professors approaching retirement age seems odd. They sort of seem very much similar on so many levels. Diversity is not what comes to mind as a choice on the ballot in the election if these are the candidates. While it is humourous to point this out, this is something that should concern us.

We have to ask ourselves what is going when there are so few women willing to run - I do think Elizabeth Cull has a decent chance to win the NDP nomination. We also have to ask ourselves why the Greens and Liberals could not find anyone under age of 35 to make a run for the nomination. Why is no one working class running for any party?

I look at the last names of all of the candidates in the running and Oswald Mosely would have had trouble getting as pure a set of people from British Isles ancestry as what we will have to choose from on election day. The only name I can even sort of wonder if it is from somewhere other than the British Isles is the name Cull. You would think after 141 years some party with a serious chance of winning might have attracted a Salish person to run for them. Is it written somewhere that the majority of our MPs have trace their ancestry back to those dank and dreary islands?

We are in 2012 and our political system still seems to be oriented towards upper middle class people of some sort of British extraction and a long list of degrees. We have a political class in this country that is not representative of the people. Our political class is in most cases are in the 1% before they are elected and those that are not join because of the high salary and benefits MPs get paid. Can we expect good governance when the parliament in Ottawa does not have the diversity of experience of the country?

I have no good ideas on who this can be changed but I do think it is a problem for country when our political class mainly come from a tiny wealthy white elite.